Little Cog
by quietwraith
Summary: When he was twelve years old, Dey Brown joined the Peacekeeper Academy. When he was seventeen years old, the Rebellion broke out. When he was ninety-three years old, his past was unearthed. It is doubtful that even a small percentage of the Peacekeepers faced any sort of justice, but perhaps there was a steady trickle of cases to remind them that their crimes were not forgotten.


When he was twelve years old, Dey Brown joined the Peacekeeper Academy. Half the village turned up at the door of his family's little hut to offer their congratulations. Nobody in his family had any sort of education, and sending a child to the Academy let them hold their heads a little bit higher.

"Make us proud, Dey, alright?" his parents said as they stood on the dilapidated platform and Brown leaned out the train window, which had no glass. Brown hugged them, and promised that he'd do everything to make them proud.

The medical examination revealed that Brown had a minor heart condition. He was bitterly disappointed that he wouldn't be able to hunt down dangerous saboteurs with a gun in his hand, but he was a smart boy, and after all, you can't have an army without desk workers. Brown studied hard, already dreaming of a position on a Head Peacekeeper's staff. Maybe he could even work under the Commander in the Capitol!

When he was seventeen years old, the Rebellion broke out.

The older cadets were all graduated early, and Brown was ordered to Stonehelm, Two's most infamous prison, as an ordinary guard to replace the healthy ones, who had all been sent to fight. He wasn't sure he liked being part of what was going on there, but the idea of asking to be assigned somewhere else didn't even enter his mind. Without even a perfunctory argument, he joined the motley crew of the unfit for combat in their grisly role.

For several months, Brown stood in his guard tower and watched inmates be marched back and forth. Sometimes they were marched into the woods and never came back. Brown didn't think about what happened to them. These were dangerous Rebels, after all, the people who had already set the country ablaze once before and were doing it again. The fact that some of them were just children was ignored by Brown. After all, if a child could try to defect, they could pay for their crimes - that was what Brown thought.

Gunshots sounded from below, as they often did. Brown ignored that, too, putting the sounds out of his mind as soon as the last echoes faded away. If someone had been sentenced to death, what right did a mere guard have to question it? He glanced down, seeing several inmates dragging away the bodies. The bloodstains were massive. Brown looked up, staring at the clear blue sky, and wanted to go home.

When it became clear that the Rebellion was going to take Two, Brown took off his uniform and disappeared into the crowd just days before the inmates of the camp were all massacred. He rejoined his family in their little mountain village and lived happily ever after, just like nearly every single other former Peacekeeper.

"I wasn't involved in any of the atrocities," he repeated over and over until he almost believed it himself. "All I did was stand around guarding a minor outpost. I never even saw a Rebel!" And everyone believed his words, not wanting to suspect such a nice man of such terrible things. How could you accuse old Mr. Brown of being one of those murderous Peacekeepers? It was hard enough to imagine him in a uniform with a gun in his hand!

At reunions, he didn't speak much. None of the former prison guards did. He sat in a corner, watching an old woman sip tea and insist that she had been a soldier like any other. Everyone nodded along to her words, even Brown, who had never been a soldier in the sense that the other veteran meant. "They won't even let me be buried with my rank!" she complained. Brown joked that he wasn't interested in being buried at all, to much laughter. Even he, who hadn't reached nineteen in all his time in uniform, was by now at the age at which one knows that their time will be up soon.

Unfortunately for Brown, he lived a few years too long. Historians doing research on the guards of Stonehelm Prison discovered that one of them was still alive, and his name was Dey Brown.

When he was ninety-three, his past was unearthed.

Brown finally stood trial, old and frail, accused of being an accessory to the murder of 1,482 people. The last of the Peacekeeper trials began, made slightly absurd by the fact that it was being run by a juvenile court, as Brown had been underage during his time as a Peacekeeper. This was a rare incident of an underage person having committed a crime to which the statute of limitations did not apply, and the amount of time that had passed since then just made the entire situation more bizarre. Due to Brown's health, there were only three sessions, two hours long each, every week. The entire situation was perfect material for dark jokes.

Brown was not in the mood for jokes as the trial began. Still-living survivors and historians described the conditions in Stonehelm, painting a horrific picture that was history to most, and memory to a vanishing few. However, the name 'Dey Brown' barely appeared in the testimony. He was being tried on the basis of having been a cog in the machinery of repression, nothing more, and that infuriated Brown.

How was he an accessory to murder? All he had done was stand around being bored in a guard tower! Of course, he felt terrible about the role he had played in the system, but in the legal sense, he had done nothing wrong! And how could they try him for something that had happened seventy-five years ago? Surely they couldn't consider his actions a crime against humanity, that was utterly absurd!

Unfortunately for Brown, several recent trials had created iron-clad precedents. Even though he had never as much as slapped an inmate, Brown was given the insultingly low sentence of two years in prison.

Furious at the outcome, Brown had a stroke and died before the logistics of how his imprisonment would even work could be dealt with. And so passed one of the last of the Peacekeepers, in a hospital bed and surrounded by family at the age of ninety-three. The fact that he had been brought to trial and found guilty was small consolation to all of those who remembered the touch of the repressive machine he had once served.

* * *

This story is inspired by a real-life person. At the time of writing, the 93-year-old Bruno Dey had been on trial for having been a concentration camp guard in 1944-45. On July 23, 2020, he was given a suspended sentence.


End file.
